Mediaboss Marketing

Kevin DeAnna who met with Thiel on the evening of July 29, 2016, in the midst of the 2016 election cycle was not merely a participant in a white supremacist subculture when he met Thiel but also was immersed in its most extreme elements, including literature admired by terrorists. Deanna wrote under the pseudonyms Gregory Hood and James Kirkpatrick over a decade for white nationalist publications such as VDARE and American Renaissance, as Hatewatch reported in a four-part series published in March 2020. He cited texts like SIEGE and used terminology drawn from such other books as The Turner Diaries in his work and in private conversation. The Turner Diaries, originally published in 1978, has influenced some of the most infamous acts of U.S. domestic terrorism, including the murder of Alan Berg in 1984 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. SIEGE, once an obscure neo-Nazi newsletter, has resurfaced in recent years as the preferred text of neo-Nazi terroristic organizations such as the now-defunct Atomwaffen Division.

Peter Thiel speaks onstage during the New York Times Dealbook conference on Nov. 1, 2018, in New York City. (Photo by Michael Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times)

DeAnna was also connected to people in the U.S. government. About six weeks prior to his meeting with Thiel, DeAnna discussed recruiting for a white nationalist group with State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert. Gebert, who used the pseudonym Coach Finstock online, recruited members for D.C. Helicopter Pilots a Virginia and Washington, D.C.-based organizing chapter of white nationalist organization The Right Stuff. Gebert was suspended from his job in the Bureau of Energy Resources, but the State Department has never clarified whether or not he is still being paid.

Hatewatch confirmed reporting first published in Buzzfeed suggesting Thiel met with DeAnna, using a cache of images provided by former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh, who has since renounced white nationalism. McHugh captured a picture of DeAnnas exchange with Thiel, as well as of several other emails, in August 2016. Hatewatch was able to compare a screenshot of one of these photos, given to us by McHugh in November 2018, with a series of cached images uploaded to her iCloud. Hatewatch has also been able to verify another email thread between DeAnna and his editors at VDARE, a white nationalist website where he wrote under the pseudonym James Kirkpatrick, discussing the meeting in the same manner.

Hatewatch reached out to Thiel, DeAnna, Gebert and several other figures mentioned in this article. All but one, VDARE editor Peter Brimelow, declined to comment. Brimelow told Hatewatch that he [didnt] have clear recollection of the events mentioned in an email and asked, Isnt it rather a long time ago? Hatewatch also reached out to both Facebook and Palantir, a data analytics firm co-founded by Thiel. Palantir declined to respond, and a spokesperson from Facebook declined to comment.

The images provided to Hatewatch show a series of messages between Thiel, DeAnna and Brendan Kissam. Kissam, according to BuzzFeed, is a former conservative activist who has produced videos for VDARE under a pseudonym. Archived posts from Kissams Facebook, which were provided to Hatewatch by a group of antifascist researchers known as the Anonymous Comrades Collective, showed him interacting with white nationalists such as Counter-Currents Greg Johnson and Millicent Willows an account that appears to belong to the white nationalist YouTuber Colin Robertson, who published videos under the pseudonym Millennial Woes. (Millicent Willows used the same logo as Robertsons Millennial Woes YouTube channel.) On Jan. 21, 2017, the same weekend as Trumps presidential inauguration, he posted a selfie with Richard Spencer, who lived near Washington, D.C., at the time.

Kissam introduced the two men over email on July 30, 2016 a few days after Thiel appeared at the Republican National Convention. The message used the subject line Right Wing Dinner Squad III. Though the intent is unclear, the subject line appears similar to a meme popular on the far right, Right Wing Death Squad. As a meme it refers to the history of authoritarian far-right dictatorships and their extrajudicial killings.

Kissam wrote that he had been looking forward to you guys getting to meet. Thiel then followed up with DeAnna individually, saying he really enjoyed meeting you last night and suggesting they meet up when Thiel was in Washington, D.C., next or whenever DeAnna was in SF which likely stood for San Francisco, where Thiel lived.

As Hatewatch has noted, DeAnna had been involved with far-right and, later, white nationalist organizations for 10 years at the time the email was exchanged with Thiel.

It is unclear who else was at the gathering. However, in another email referencing the meeting, DeAnnas editor at VDARE, Peter Brimelow, cited a few other possible attendees. Dated July 2, a little less than 30 days before Thiel, DeAnna and Kissam met, Brimelow chastised DeAnna for not keeping him abreast of Alt Right developments. He cited a forthcoming meeting with the Right Stuff, Ann Coulter, Thiel, etc. as an example.

DeAnna was one of numerous people who attempted to balance careers in mainstream institutions in and around Washington, D.C., with a secret life as a white nationalist organizer. In 2006, he founded a far-right student group, Youth for Western Civilization (YWC), while working at the right-wing Leadership Institute as a field representative. (Leadership Institute, which has provided training for a number of prominent right-wing figures in the past, denied any affiliation with YWC.) While head of YWC, DeAnna began writing under the bylines Gregory Hood and James Kirkpatrick on hate sites in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Over the course of the next 12 years, DeAnna wrote well over 1,700 articles for white nationalist outlets, including VDARE, the National Policy Institutes Radix Journal, American Renaissance, Counter-Currents and The Social Contract.

Kevin DeAnna appears at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Jeff Malet)

Kissam, for his part, was clearly aware of DeAnnas pseudonymous personas at the time he connected DeAnna to Thiel.

As McHugh recalled to Hatewatch, Kissam had attended an event where DeAnna was scheduled to speak as Gregory Hood a few months prior to his meeting with Thiel. She noted that both men were attendees at Counter-Currents inaugural New York Forum in May 2016. DeAnna, who had been a Counter-Currents contributor since 2011, was billed as one of the main speakers. McHugh, who attended the event with DeAnna, told Hatewatch that she met Kissam after the event. She noted that Kissam accompanied Counter-Currents publisher Greg Johnson, as well as other speakers, to a restaurant in the city after the speeches at the forum concluded.

DeAnna indulged deeper, more sinister currents within the white power movement as well.

DeAnnas work under the pseudonym Gregory Hood drew upon foundational white nationalist and neo-Nazi texts that have inspired numerous acts of domestic terrorism. As both Kirkpatrick and Hood, DeAnna frequently refers to a System often with a capital S, mirroring Turner Diaries author William Pierces own orthography. DeAnna, like Pierce, presents the System as both a governmental and nongovernmental coalition of minority groups set out to destroy whites.

Writing as Hood, DeAnna cited SIEGE, a collection of neo-Nazi James Masons writings, on numerous occasions. In 2013, years before the text was popularized by the neo-Nazi forum Iron March, DeAnna cited SIEGE in a Counter-Currents essay about the need to destroy the Republican Party. DeAnna wrote that Mason was correct in stating that white advocates must think of all white people everywhere as our army. The original post, published on Counter-Currents website on Jan. 31, 2013, linked to a part of the site where one could buy Masons tract for $20, plus shipping and handling.

McHugh, who dated DeAnna from 2013 to 2016, and again briefly in 2017, told Hatewatch that DeAnna owned a copy of SIEGE prior to its popularization by the neo-Nazi forum Iron March.

The bold, red lettering of SIEGE on the book spine is unmistakable. It is a heavy book, and DeAnna told me not to read it, she told Hatewatch.

Some of DeAnnas writing, such as an April 2016 essay in Radix Journal titled On LARPing, combined references to both The Turner Diaries and SIEGE.

Most of us dont do anything. . . . We dont take to the streets; we dont hang the traitors from lampposts; we dont revolt the same way any of our ancestors would, DeAnna wrote.

Unless youre not paying taxes, living outside the law, or in some form of war against the powers that be, youll be objectively helping the System keep going, whatever subversive thoughts you have within your own head. Hence, the radical (even by National Socialist standards) James Mason recommended either total war or dropping out of the System entirely, he continued.

The essay earned him the praise of at least one user on Iron March, an international neo-Nazi forum that birthed the terroristic neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division.

Gregory Hood is by far the closest writer to our views that [Radix Journal has], wrote one user, James Futurist, on Nov. 16, 2016.

DeAnna helped carry water for the more violent wing of the movement in other ways. The email thread between DeAnna and the Brimelows referring to his forthcoming meeting with Thiel contained a reference to a Gregory Hood article about Sacramento on AmRen. Here, Brimelow is referencing a piece penned by DeAnna under his Hood pseudonym about the battle of Sacramento a June 26, 2016, riot in Sacramento that broke out after members of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party and Golden State Skinheads clashed with antifascist counterprotesters. As Hatewatch reported, the event resulted in 514 misdemeanor and 68 felony charges, and it involved over 100 people.

There is no doubt that it was the leftists who started the violence, but by most accounts, it was the TWP that finished it, DeAnna wrote on July 1, 2016, parroting the language used by TWPs leader Matthew Heimbach. DeAnna called TWP and GSSs event a legally sanctioned demonstration, and wrote, It is invariably violent or potentially violent leftists who attack white advocates who are demonstrating or meeting peacefully.

However, Heimbach who was not present at the event boasted at the time that we, referring the participants in the TWP and GSS event, sent six antifascist protesters to the hospital.

Around the same time he met with Thiel, DeAnna was invited to a white nationalist recruitment meeting by former State Department official Matthew Q. Gebert.

In June, a little less than two months before his post-RNC dinner with Thiel, DeAnna received an email from Gebert inviting him and McHugh to a gathering of what appeared to be members of the white nationalist group D.C. Helicopter Pilots. The group appeared to be largely active between 2016 and 2018.

Our nucleus (about 10 sharp and accomplished goys) will meet for dinner around 6 pm in Old Town, then head out to a few bars where some prospects from the Forum will join. If your plans fall through, wed be honored to host you and the lady as special (surprise) guests for dinner, or just grab a few drinks after, Gebert wrote from a Proton Mail account associated with his Coach Finstock pseudonym on June 16, 2016.

Old Town here appears to refer to the historic district of Alexandria, Virginia.

The prospects from the Forum appears to refer to members looking to join the local chapter of TRS for which Gebert performed recruitment, as Hatewatch previously reported.

In fall 2018, this reporter received a tip from a source, then anonymous, who claimed to have information on an alleged meeting between Peter Thiel and a prominent white nationalist that took place during the 2016 election cycle. The source later revealed herself to be former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh.

In November 2018, McHugh provided Hatewatch with an image file showing an email exchange between DeAnna and Thiel. McHugh told Hatewatch that the image was a photo she had taken with her phone of DeAnnas unlocked computer in August 2016, when the two were living together in Virginia.

However, the file provided to Hatewatch was a screenshot dated November 2018, and not the original JPG file from McHughs phone. As a result, it lacked the metadata that would corroborate the time and date the photo was taken, and when/if it was backed up to either McHughs hard drive or the cloud.

Hatewatch has now been able to verify the authenticity of these images from a reconstructed archive of McHughs iCloud, which was created when McHugh backed up her phone by plugging it into her computer. Hatewatch was also able to verify images of a few other emails in the same manner.

With these cached images in hand, Hatewatch concluded McHugh conducted a backup on Sept. 15, 2016, as that is when MacOS appears to have created the cache. Hatewatch was thus able to determine that McHugh had taken this image between backups made on Aug. 5, 2016, and Sept. 15, 2016 a timeline that matched McHughs own recollection that she took the photo in early Aug. 2016.

The image appeared identical to the screenshot provided to this reporter in late 2018.

Photo illustration by SPLC

Visit link:
White Nationalist Who Met With Peter Thiel Admired Terroristic Literature - Southern Poverty Law Center

I was a mere 70 pages into Donald McNeils brief about his firing from The New York Times when I emailed a dozen of my friends to demand they read it immediately. But they dont have my perseverance, so here are the highlights.

Two years after McNeil chaperoned a group of high schoolers on a trip to Peru to learn about rural health care, The Daily Beast published an article detailing the students list of denunciations against him, including the career-ending claim that hed used the N-word.

Days later, it came out that he had used the word in response to a students question about a high school girl whod been suspended from school for using the infamous word. He repeated it in order to ask how shed said it.

This paragraph, particularly the parenthetical, is all you need to know about McNeils misadventure in Peru:

At some point, a student took issue with my having said the U.S. wasnt a colonial power, saying something like: Dont you realize what the CIA has done? Dont you realize that the United Fruit Company interfered in central America to protect its banana monopoly? ... (This student herself was white, from Greenwich, CT and went to Andover but mentioned multiple times over the week that she had a Latino boyfriend and he had opened her eyes to a different view of the world ...)

None of the students on this resume-padding trip were black. There was one Asian, and the rest were white, dripping with white privilege. (Who else goes on a Princeton-bait trip to Peru in high school to learn about rural health care?) Twenty of the 22 students were girls. All appear to be complete idiots.

McNeil went on the exact same trip and gave the same lectures to a different group of high school students the summer before and got rave reviews. But the 2019 batch were in the advanced Spotting Racism class.

During McNeils struggle sessions with his interrogators at the Times, he was accused of an array of crimes against political correctness. Heres a sampling:

Charlotte (Behrendt, associate managing editor for employee relations): Did you say the word n****r on this trip?

McNeil: Yes, I did. [Explains context.]

Charlotte: Did you say theres no such thing as white privilege?

McNeil: No. Thats ridiculous ...

Charlotte: So you didnt say there was no such thing?

McNeil: No. Absolutely not. That doesnt even make any sense.

Charlotte: Did you say there is no such thing as institutional racism?

McNeil: No, I didnt ...

Charlotte: Did you say it was OK to wear blackface?

McNeil: No, I didnt.

Charlotte: Did you say climate change didnt matter because it only killed poor people?

McNeil: What? No, of course not.

Charlotte: Did you make fun of a students hometown?

McNeil: I dont think so. What hometown?

McNeils unprovoked attack on someones hometown consisted of his hearing that one student was from Boston, and saying, Nice town ... except for that baseball team. [Yankees-Red Sox rivalry ensues.]

Charlotte: Did you tell a joke about a doctor and a Jewish mother?

McNeil: A doctor and a Jewish mother ...? I dont think so ... Do you know the joke?

McNeil later remembered that hed used a stock joke from his usual speech to doctors:

I was pre-med for a year, but when I told my mother what I was thinking, she laughed and said: Donald, youre never going to be a doctor. You dont have the patience to get through medical school.

So, if any of you are wondering what its like to NOT be raised by a Jewish mother, thats pretty much it: You say you want to be a doctor, she laughs at you and says, Itll never happen.

The endless questioning of McNeils jokes and comments feels like a weird, stressful dream. But the little Nazi block watchers held a trump card: Theyd asked him about the N-word and ... HE RESPONDED!

Fired.

McNeils story goes far beyond him, a crotchety leftist, angry about people walking in parks during the COVID shutdowns. Way too much of his response consists of his submission to the woke overlords, admitting that maybe he IS a racist and denouncing his grandfather as an anti-Semite. So forget McNeil. Its Iran-Iraq.

Nonetheless, his story gives readers a terrifying glimpse of the next generation of grim conformists being pumped out by the nations education establishment.

These holy terrors are tormenting newsrooms across New York City at New York magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times. They are true believers, not original thinkers race-obsessed, gender-obsessed, anti-white, anti-American, and much, much stupider than reporters used to be. Just tell me what Im supposed to think and Ill think it. These are the sort of people who ought to be office managers ordering staples and mousepads, not people who report news.

These sourpuss zealots are in such a mad race to show their wokeness, they are useless as conduits for the news. What they do isnt reporting. Its terrorism.

Originally posted here:
Ann Coulter: Attack of the woke teen career killers - Today's News-Herald

Editors note: The death of Rush Limbaugh, the growth of Newsmax and charges of censorship by Amazon and other book sellers are among the forces shaking up conservative media companies. In this three-part series, the Deseret News examines the challenges facing radio, television and book publishing, and how those challenges might affect the companies and you: the reader, listener and viewer.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley lost a book deal. Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling lost fans. And now, even as a prospective merger of two large publishing houses in the U.S. is rattling the industry, Amazon is deleting content it deems offensive from the worlds largest platform for book sales.

In this tumultuous landscape, can conservative authors still continue to speak freely and sell books?

Yes, publishers say, but they may have to change the way they do business in a culture newly cognizant of the power to cancel people with unpopular opinions.

We dont let it directly determine what we publish, but the fact is, with every book, there is always fear that the book is going to be pulled. The authors feel very vulnerable, said David Bernstein, publisher of Bombardier Books, a conservative imprint of Post Hill Press.

Conservative fears were realized this month when the book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, by Catholic scholar Ryan T. Anderson, vanished from the Amazon website three years after it was published.

Four Republican senators, including Utahs Mike Lee, called the action political censorship, saying in a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos that Amazon has openly signaled to conservative Americans that their views are not welcome on its platforms.

But the controversy over Andersons book is only the latest action troubling conservative writers and publishers. Others include the cancellation of a forthcoming Hawley book critical of technology companies by Simon & Schuster, protests against a new book by Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and an open letter signed by people in the publishing industry who say no one affiliated with former President Donald Trumps administration should get a book contract.

The tremors shaking book publishing usually go undetected by the public, since the average reader only pays attention to the book, its content and the author, not the company that publishes a book, said Thomas Spence, who became president and publisher of Regnery Publishing a year ago.

Regnery, founded in 1947, has published books by Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Malkin and Dennis Prager, among other conservatives well acquainted with controversy. Regnerys success was a major reason that the largest publishing houses in the U.S. established their own conservative imprints, publishing insiders say.

But the outcry against authors who express unpopular beliefs is growing louder in the environment known as cancel culture, and some writers are warning that recent events will effectively muzzle conservatives. The backlash to Amazons decision, however, suggests that the outlook for conservative publishing is still bright. Heres why.

Andersons book, described by author Rod Dreher as a well-written, scientifically informed critique of gender ideology by a leading Catholic public intellectual, is still for sale on the website of the publisher, Encounter Books, as well as on the Barnes & Noble website and other places online.

Anderson, who recently became president of the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., told Dreher, writing for The American Conservative, that he has sold a couple of thousand books in the past week, adding this is unheard of for a three-year-old book.

He noted that Amazons action came at the same time Congress was considering the Equality Act and suggested that Amazons action has a silver lining, which is this could be (the) further catalyst thatll interrupt the libertarian slumber of many conservatives and prompt them to think critically about what, for example, the natural law says about both the justification of and limits to economic liberties.

Author Abigail Shrier is not as optimistic. Shrier, a journalist whose book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, has been removed twice from the Target website, wrote that the Amazon case is dangerous because of the outsized influence the company wields in publishing.

As a direct result of Amazons action, many outstanding books will now go unwritten; they will not be commissioned whenever Amazons distribution is the slightest bit in doubt. As I write this, authors are being dropped by agents or politely refused representation, based on what the agents now know Amazon will not carry, Shrier wrote.

Shriers book, however, is still listed on Amazon, as is God and the Transgender Debate, an examination of what the Bible has to say about gender by Southern Baptist theologian Andrew T. Walker.

So is a take on Andersons book, Let Harry Become Sally, an e-book by Kelly R. Novak that Amazon billed last week as a #1 best seller.

Amazon has not given a specific reason for removing Andersons book, saying only that the company reserves the right to delist content that violates its standards.

In an email, Anderson said this could be a moment that determines how the company will operate going forward. If Amazon hears from enough people, perhaps that will lead it to reconsider its decision and not just on me, but also preventing future de-platforming. If Amazon gets away with this, itll likely lead to more de-platforming in the future.

While Anderson can only speculate about the reasons his book is no longer on Amazon, Hawley, the Missouri senator, knows why Simon & Schuster canceled his book contract because the company put out a statement. Without giving specifics, the publisher said that Hawley, a Trump supporter who was the first senator to say he would challenge the 2020 election results, had a role in the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints; at the same time, we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom, the statement said.

Hawleys book deal was canceled the day after the riot. The next week, more than 250 authors, editors, agents and other workers in publishing signed an open letter that said no companies should publish work by anyone who incited, suborned, instigated or otherwise supported the riot, or who was a participant in the Trump administration. The number of signers is now approaching 600.

But within two weeks, Hawley had another publisher in Regnery, and Spence explained the decision in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, in which he said cancel culture is more appropriately described as blacklisting.

Not so long ago, publishing professionals would have been horrified to be accused of it. Today they compete to see who can proclaim his blacklist with the fiercest invective, Spence wrote.

So far, Amazon hasnt been inclined to cancel Hawleys book; its accepting pre-orders for The Tyranny of Big Tech and gives a release date of May 4.

Spence said hed been following Hawleys career knew he was a Yale Law School graduate and was a former Supreme Court clerk and had thought it would be nice to have a book from him before this one essentially landed in his lap. A lot of people have sent me emails saying, Oh, youre so courageous, thanks for taking a stand and taking this book, and I have to blush. I think I did the right thing, but I dont know that it was particularly courageous in this case, he said.

Getting canceled by Simon & Schuster has raised the profile of the book a lot, he added.

That has happened before, said Bernstein of Bombardier Books. When Simon & Schuster canceled a book by Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017, the far-right commentator self-published Dangerous and sold upwards of 100,000 copies, Bernstein said.

Donald Trump Jr. also self-published his second book, Liberal Privilege.

Bernstein said that conservative imprints such as Center Street at Hachette Book Group or Sentinel at Penguin are ghettos within the largest publishing houses, which he said skew young and liberal. The problem with conservative books within the large publishing houses is that theyre not going to support you if there is any controversy. The first whiff of controversy, Josh Hawley gets his book canceled. The first whiff of controversy, (Florida GOP Congressman) Matt Gaetz gets his book canceled. The editors get fired or get shifted around. Or the imprint gets closed. All of these things are happening at an increasing pace right now.

The New York Times recently reported that longtime editor Kate Hartson, editorial director at Center Street, had been let go and that Hartson told colleagues she thought her termination was because of her political beliefs. She had published books by Donald Trump Jr., Newt Gingrich, radio host Michael Savage and Rand Paul, among others. Her most recent book was reported to be Unmasked: Inside Antifas Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, by Andy Ngo.

Not every objection to an author results in a book being canceled. When Penguin Random House Canada announced that it was publishing Jordan Petersons Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, the company had to hold a town-hall style meeting for employees who were upset about the decision. It was published anyway. (In the U.S., the book was released March 2 under Penguins Portfolio imprint.)

And some authors, like J.K. Rowling, have the benefit of being too successful to be truly canceled, Bernstein said. Her position in publishing is kind of untouchable. When you make up that much of a companys bottom line shes like a line item of her own on their balance sheet no company is going to release her and give up that revenue.

For many conservative authors, however, the fear of being de-platformed is real, whether it be on a sales platform or social media.

Frankly, the number of books that get pulled off of Amazon is infinitesimal, but these stories get magnified and people are rightly concerned, because the number of people being de-platformed on Twitter started off being very small, too, Bernstein said.

Small conservative imprints such as Bombardier may benefit from the current environment if authors seek publishers who share their views. But so may Regnery, whose namesake, the late Henry Regnery, published Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher in 1979.

Spence, who said his views were shaped by the First Things essay Why the News Make Us Dumb by C. John Sommerville and The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk, welcomes the business, although he realizes that this may be a particularly vulnerable moment for conservative publishers.

Certain big players in the publishing world have the power to make our business very difficult if they want to. Thats Amazon and Google, all the people targeted by Josh Hawleys book, and maybe Im stupid to be publishing a book punching them in the nose, Spence said.

If we couldnt sell our books on Amazon, that would be a pretty serious blow. We sell most of our books on Amazon. What they have done on rare occasions is make it more difficult for people to find our books. He cited Shriers book, which Regnery published. The company wanted to buy ads that would make the book more prominent in searches, but Spence said that Amazon would not let them buy ads for that book.

Spence is also cognizant of the power of Facebook and Twitter, and that social media platforms could also take action to block promotion of one of his authors or books.

Theres a lot of potential hazards on the road ahead, he said. But its also good times for Regnery, because theres no such thing as bad publicity. Controversy is good.

View original post here:
Is Amazon allowed to censor conservative books? - Deseret News

Breadcrumb Trail Links

It is to the eternal shame of many in the self-styled progressive community that they have turned against the library system for the crime of tolerating free expression

Author of the article:

Publishing date:

If Dr. Seuss Enterprises did anything useful last week in taking six of the late doctors books out of print, surely it could have done something more useful by showing its work: Which hurtful and wrong depictions and descriptions of non-white people did its panel of experts consider beyond the pale, and which did it not, and why? Seuss Enterprises is free to publish and not publish whatever it wants, but its decisions will contribute to a much broader and important conversation about what to do with otherwise beloved or revered literature, especially childrens literature, that reflects unfortunate attitudes of its period.

Some of the culprits are clear: In If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, stereotypical caricatures of African and Asian men are depicted helping young Gerald McGrew collect his menagerie including from the mountains of Zomba-ma-Tant, where young Geralds aides all wear their eyes at a slant. But much of the other material is far less obviously problematic not just compared to the six delisted titles, but potentially also to Seusss most famous and beloved works, which his executors presumably wish to continue selling for profit.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

The Grinch is thought of by some as a Jewish stereotype, taking diabolical glee in subverting societal norms and desecrating Christian traditions, as University of Michigan literature professor Ryan Szpiech wrote in 2019. In 2014, Kansas State University childrens literature scholar Philip Nel argued the Grinch also echoes 19th-century caricatures of the Irish and that The Cat In the Hat is about a conflict between white children and a black cat whose character and costume borrow from blackface performance.

These were academic analyses, not denunciations. Neither was calling for any of Seusss work to be unpublished. But in the court of public opinion nowadays, things can spin out of control awfully fast. No ones setting these (books) on fire. No ones saying you cannot read them, Nel told Esquire last week, arguing the controversy was overblown. No ones saying they must be removed from libraries. No ones saying they must be removed from your home.

I can report from Toronto that this is not the case. Now looms a larger question, Toronto Star journalist Evy Kwong intoned last week on the papers TikTok account: What happens to the books that are still in the bookstore or at the library?

Its unclear on (sic) whether Dr. Seuss Enterprises will be mandating that the six books be removed from circulation across the globe, the paper reported.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

In a follow-up article on Monday, another Star reporter found and interviewed a woman who was offering for sale her personal copy of one of the cancelled Seuss books. The reporter explained that the womanbelieves she should maintain freedom to have or sell the titles, despite the conclusion of others or positions of companies much in the way she might believe the Earth orbits the sun and not vice versa.

Does it really need explaining that books are private property? That libraries have something much closer to an obligation to retain out-of-print or unpopular books than an obligation to get rid of them for historians sake, if no one elses?

The Chicago Tribune reports the citys public library system will allow the copies currently on loan to remain with their borrowers, and honour existing holds, and thereafter temporarily keep the books as reference copies while it assesses long-term options. If one of those options is not keeping at least one copy each as a reference item, then we have wandered into a very dark place. I trust that wont be the case in Chicago.

The Star, meanwhile, managed to find a Toronto bookstore proprietor who objected even to library staff taking the time to review the books content before deciding what to do. If the people who produce the book say theres an original culture concern why are you questioning it? Miguel San Vincente demanded to know.

Libraries have something much closer to an obligation to retain out-of-print or unpopular books than an obligation to get rid of them

Its mind-boggling. The Toronto Public Library keeps copies of discredited memoirs, preludes to genocide, inspirations to terrorists, anti-Islamic and anti-Christian and anti-Semitic and anti-atheist screeds, pulp non-fiction from Ann Coulter and Naomi Klein alike, and everything in between and beyond. Because thats what a library is for.

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

It is to the eternal shame of many in Torontos self-styled progressive community that they have turned against the library system for the crime of tolerating free expression a grotesque phenomenon that reached its nadir when it dared unapologetically to rent a room to a feminist (but allegedly transphobic) activist in 2019 to deliver a really quite anodyne speech.

And it is bewildering that they cant see the truth lying just beyond their own noses: that if they ever manage to win these battles to silence unpopular voices of the moment, they will inevitably wind up ruing the day.Every year the American Library Associations Office for Intellectual Freedom publishes a list of the most challenged books in American libraries. In 2019, eight of the top 10 were on the list because of LGBTQIA+ content. The other two were Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale and the Harry Potter series.

When culture warriors on any side lose the plot, dispassionate librarians in Toronto and many other cities are there to help them find it again. They just have to let them do their jobs. Assuming (confidently) that Torontos chief librarians dont decide to send the troublesome Seuss titles to the woodchipper, or alternatively to put them front and centre in their branches childrens sections, I suggest we defer to their wisdom.

Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it please check your junk folder.

The next issue of Posted Newsletter will soon be in your inbox.

We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notificationsyou will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.

Originally posted here:
Chris Selley: For the love of Seuss, leave libraries alone - National Post

Here is this weeks installment of The New York Times is ALWAYS lying about criminals (and probably everything else).

The Times desperately wants you to believe that there are actual cases of innocent people being put to death in America. Their current poster boy for the cause is Sedley Alley, executed in 2006. But the Criminal Lobby is hoping a post-mortem DNA test on evidence that has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence will allow them to howl that an INNOCENT man was executed!

I knew nothing about this case, but I knew the Times description of the facts was a lie. How did I know?

1) No jury would have convicted a man, much less sentenced him to death, much less had that sentence repeatedly upheld, on such a flimsy record; and

2) There is no credible evidence that a single innocent person has been put to death in this country for at least 75 years.

Here are the facts the about the Criminal Lobbys latest baby seal.

On the night of July 11, 1985, two Marines from a naval base in Millington, Tennessee, reported a possible kidnapping after they heard a female jogger screaming, Dont touch me! Leave me alone! They ran in her direction, but just as they got close, a station wagon peeled off the side of the road. A gate guard also reported seeing a station wagon, which he said was being driven by a man constraining a woman.

All three witnesses described the car as a late-model green or brown Ford or Mercury station wagon with wood paneling, Kentucky tags and a loud muffler.

Alley, who owned a dark green 1972 Mercury station wagon with wood paneling and a Kentucky license plate, was brought in for questioning at 1 a.m. that night. The Marines whod reported the kidnapping identified Alleys vehicle as the one theyd seen, both by sight and by the roar of the muffler.

But Alley and his wife gave a satisfactory explanation for their whereabouts and were released.

At 6 a.m. on July 12, the body of 19-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Suzanne Collins was found in a nearby park. Alley was arrested and promptly confessed to murdering her claiming it was an accident.

He told his wife, Yes, I killed the gal at ... Orgill Park.

In his lengthy, tape-recorded confession, Alley tried to soft-pedal his barbaric crime, claiming hed hit Collins with his car by accident, and only decided to savagely beat her to death because, as he was driving her to the hospital, she threatened to turn him into the police.

Alley then took investigators to the precise spot where hed murdered Collins and even showed them the tree where hed broken off the branch that hed jammed inside of her.

At trial, Alley admitted he did it, but pleaded insanity. The jury didnt buy it, convicted him and sentenced him to death.

Here is what the Times Emily Bazelon tells that papers clueless readers about Alleys case:

[T]wo Marines ... reported crossing paths with Lance Corporal Collins while she was running. They said that moments after they saw her, they dodged a brown station wagon with a blue license plate ... [L]aw enforcement officers stopped Sedley Alley, then 29. He was driving a dark green station wagon with a blue plate.

Times readers are led to believe that although witnesses said it was a BROWN station wagon, Tennessee yokels picked up a guy in a GREEN station wagon!

Except thats not true. The BOLO alert (be on the lookout) put out by the Naval Investigation Service identified a a brown or green Ford or Mercury station wagon with woodgrain on the sides.

Bazelon:

When the investigators began interrogating him, Mr. Alley, who had been drinking, denied knowing anything about Lance Corporal Collins and asked for a lawyer. But 12 hours later, he signed a statement confessing to the murder.

Times readers are supposed to think these backwoods Nazis interrogated Alley without a lawyer for 12 hours until he confessed! In fact, the only reason he signed a statement 12 hours later was that, after being questioned the night of the crime, he was sent home. Alley wasnt arrested until after Collins body was discovered the next day, whereupon he quickly confessed.

Bazelon:

Mr. Alleys admission, which he later said was false and coerced ...

Yes, later in the sense of 20 years later. For two decades, Alley never denied hed murdered Collins. He only recalled that his confession was coerced in 2004, when he was trying to delay the hangmans noose.

Bazelon:

But the location he gave for the collision didnt line up with the witness accounts.

There were no witness accounts for the collision for the simple reason that there was no collision. My car hit her by accident was Alleys attempt to mitigate his barbarous crime.

You know what else, Emily? His car wasnt seen driving in the direction of the hospital, either!

Somehow, his lies not matching the facts is supposed to be a point in Alleys favor.

Bazelon:

[Alleys confession] did not match the physical evidence. ... He said he ... stabbed her with a screwdriver and killed her with a tree branch. ... And the autopsy report showed that Lance Corporal Collins was not hit by a car nor stabbed with a screwdriver.

Again: There was no collision.

Im not sure what Bazelons point is about the screwdriver and the tree branch, but heres the evidence presented at trial:

The pathologist, Dr. James Bell, testified that the cause of death was multiple injuries, [many] of which could have been fatal. ... He testified that the injuries to the skull could have been inflicted by the rounded end of defendants screwdriver that was found near the scene ... He identified the tree branch that was inserted into the victims body. It measured 31 inches in length and had been inserted into the body more than once, to a depth of twenty inches ...

Bazelon:

Tire tracks found at the crime scene didnt match Mr. Alleys car, shoe prints didnt match his shoes, and a third witness who saw a man with a station wagon, close to where Lance Corporal Collins was killed, described someone who was several inches shorter than Mr. Alley, with a different hair color.

Times readers are perfectly prepared to believe that a jury of toothless hicks looked at evidence overwhelmingly clearing Alley and convicted him anyway.

But that didnt happen, because having seen the evidence for themselves, Alley and his lawyer decided his best course was to admit he did it and plead insanity. All this alleged evidence is post-hoc nonsense invented by defense lawyers that has not been admitted under the rules of evidence, has not been subjected to cross-examination, and would not prove his innocence.

Seventy-five years and counting with no credible evidence that a single innocent person has been put to death in America.

Go here to see the original:
Ann Coulter: NYT Was he innocent? Answer: No - Today's News-Herald